Britain stinks of cannabis - and our rulers' corruption: PETER HITCHENS says we are paying a heavy price for failing to enforce laws against marijuana for more than 40 years

How is it that half the country stinks of marijuana, but nobody even wonders about what effects this might be having on the general level of crime?

And I mean stinks. Take the case of the unnamed youth who casually stole the lives of two happy, loved people in Ascot last August. At the wheel of a powerful car, out of his mind on marijuana, he struck John Shackley, 61, and Jason Imi, 48, as they crossed the road, shortly before 11pm. The pair were hurled into the air, and died instantly on impact with the road.

How rash it was of these two victims to have imagined they were living in a civilised country where the police and the courts enforce the law. Their killer knew nothing serious was going to happen to him, and he was right – he received a powder-puff ‘sentence’ of ‘community service’ and some other weightless, trivial inconveniences.

How did he know he was safe to commit crime? He already had five convictions for seven offences between 2013 and 2018, mainly for drugs, including one just eight weeks before this offence when police who pulled him over for bad driving discovered that he smelled of cannabis.

The 17-year-old killer is, fascinatingly, the son of two police officers. Surely they knew of his criminal habit? Surely they noticed the smell, in their car and on his clothes?

How is it that they, sworn by a solemn oath to uphold the law without fear or favour, permitted it to continue? Are they still employed as police officers?

We cannot ask them, or the chief constable of their force, because we do not know who they are. This killer has for some reason been allowed to keep his anonymity.

I am not just discussing this ghastly case because it makes me very angry, though it does. I have chosen to write about it because it summarises a vast problem which our political and media classes, themselves hugely compromised by past and present illegal drug use, refuse to address.

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This country is now paying a very heavy price for failing to enforce its laws against marijuana for more than 40 years. Its use, though not general, is horribly widespread and we now have a hard core of regular users, visible early in wrecked schooling, later in broken, hopeless lives, unemployable husks of humans begging in shop doorways, a grief to their families and a charge on the state, and in many cases confined to the locked wards of mental hospitals. But it is sometimes worse than that. What we also see, if we look, is that the culprits of a startling number of crazy, violent offences, here and abroad, were cannabis users.

Here are some: Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale, the killers of Lee Rigby; Jared Loughner, culprit of the 2008 Tucson massacre in which six died and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was terribly wounded; Nicholas Salvador, killer, by decapitation, of Mrs Palmira Silva in London; Martin Couture-Rouleau, killer of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent in St Jean-sur-Richelieu, Canada; Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, killer of another Canadian soldier, Nathan Cirillo, in Ottawa; Jonathan Bowling and Ashley Foster, killers of the Sheffield church organist Alan Greaves, beaten to death for no reason except that they happened to choose him as their victim.

It could have been you. It might yet be.

A far longer list can be found on the internet by searching for the term ‘Attacker smoked cannabis’, which I urge anyone to do who is in any doubt about the scale and extent of a problem in which the Government and police have no interest at all.

This country is now paying a very heavy price for failing to enforce its laws against marijuana for more than 40 years (stock image)

Why this lack of interest? Because the British Establishment is corrupted by cannabis – either by its members’ past use of it, or because they allow their children to use it, or because they hope to gain something from its legalisation.

There is hardly a professional body, or an academic faculty or a government department, a police force, or a media organisation that has not been bought, suborned or infiltrated by the Billionaire Big Dope campaign to legalise marijuana.

They see vistas of easy money, in profits and in taxes. They are frantically anxious not to see that this drug is associated in major studies (notably the Swedish Army and Dunedin studies) with severe mental illness, and also with violent crime and (increasingly) with terrible deaths on the roads.

Yet hardly a week goes by without another soft-focus soppy promotion of the legalisers’ claim that this horrible drug is really just a nice medicine. It’s phoney.

It was 40 years ago, in an interview with an American university newspaper, The Emory Wheel, published on February 6, 1979, that Keith Stroup, one of the most avid campaigners for marijuana legalisation, rashly revealed the truth about ‘medicinal cannabis’.

He said: ‘We are trying to get marijuana reclassified medically. If we do that (we’ll do it in at least 20 states this year for chemotherapy patents), we’ll be using the issue as a red herring to give marijuana a good name.’

It was true then. It is true now. ‘Medical cannabis’ is just slick PR and its promoters know it.

The drug’s real effects are seen in the bodies, bleeding in the street, of those run down or cut down by people whose minds have been overthrown by a drug long misrepresented as soft.

Oh, can I just say one thing about the EU? Norway. It’s still the best way out of this mess. Bear it in mind.

Lucy uncovers biggest fib of all

Having once dressed up in full Bullingdon Club gear for a TV documentary on David Cameron (now lost, not even findable on the wildest shores of YouTube), I can’t really attack historian Lucy Worsley for clambering into period outfits for her documentaries.

Lately she’s been appearing as a cheerleader in a Philadelphia parade and even squeezed into a Scarlett O’Hara Southern Belle ballgown, left, (I’m still not quite sure why) to illustrate her BBC4 series American History’s Biggest Fibs.

And much of it, though conventionally Left-wing, was rather good. My favourite bit was her concentration on the fact that the USA, supposedly the land of the free, was in fact founded by the autocratic King of France, Louis XVI.

Having once dressed up in full Bullingdon Club gear for a TV documentary on David Cameron, I can’t really attack historian Lucy Worsley for clambering into period outfits for her documentaries.

I’ve always laughed at those Americans who mocked the French as ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’, and the silly joke, at the time of the Iraq War, where you were supposed to search for ‘French military victories’ on the internet and come up with nothing. Oh, really?

The biggest French military victory in all history was the decisive American Revolutionary War battle at Yorktown, where French naval and military might and French money, guns and ammunition defeated us. Without them, there’d have been no USA. Think of that, for a moment.

Lots of people want to forget this fact. We don’t like to remember Yorktown much at all, any more than we like to discuss Singapore in 1942. Americans are embarrassed by it. But good history is often the story of what we don’t want to know, and now the schools teach it so badly, TV is often the only place you’ll find it.